Anyone is still paying attention to what's going on there? Any ideas why it's such a miserable failure?

It seems like Nxt is superseded by Ardor and its first child chain Ignis. Jelurida's roadmap says "From Nxt to Ardor, Blockchain History in the making": https://www.jelurida.com/ardor-roadmap. Ardor was launched this year on the first of January and their team only consists of four people, so give it some time.